Category Archives: Fiction

I dreamt of you once, a long time ago
and then not again, even when I tried
to conjure you in those moments just before
the body-fall,
that slip into static-y gray sleep.

Until this morning,
when I saw you, not-you but you,
smaller and younger,
Standing on the edge of a street curb
Teetering, balancing,
the toe from one shoe tucked up
against the back of the other, rubber to rubber,
The black suede reflecting the light
in shades of textured gray.

And then the streetlights went out for just a second,
the darkness of movie streets, not real ones,
where the yellow glow still radiates from the blacktop,
where the air becomes dense with light
and dark, the universal movie cue for ominous.
A small beat in time: of misty, yellowy dark and stifling thick air.

Quickly, the full glow
of two flanking rows of white light.
And you were gone.
A piece of half chewed gum and a quarter from your pocket
where your feet had just been.

And then, in the time-shifted and earth-crawling way of dreams,
I was in my bed watching myself sleep
and I was dreaming of my own teeth
falling out,
so common they say,
just anxiety, a base fear come to life,
a universal image.

But I had never had that dream, never that I could remember.

I was spitting out tooth after tooth
Swirling them with my tongue
to keep them from falling down my throat
And they were clean and smooth and bloodless
The roots in tact and the enamel hard and thick
The teeth of a buried body washed clean
Or a life-sized doll
Or a teenager
Not my middle-aged teeth
full of fillings and root canals
and porcelain crowns shining whiter than the aged
and worn mineral of my waking mouth.

I held four or five of them in my palm,
Molars and incisors, running my fingers over the oblong shapes
and curves and dents, feeling the way form gives way to air,
Held them in my hand in my mind as I slept.

I thought they would never stop falling out,
they would never stop shifting under my tongue, over my tongue,
pushing through my lips. Even though I know
there is a finite number of them,
a point at which they would all be gone, leaving me
gumless, safe and sunken-faced.

I thought I woke, but it was only
from the dream within the dream and I was adrift,
unsure, somewhere
between real waking and real dreaming.

And I heard the song of the end credits. You know which one.
If you close your eyes, I know you can hear it now,
the strum of the opening chords and the slow upbeat
of the drums getting faster, little by little,
then the sound of me walking away,
both feet padding the rhythm on the asphalt, me:

Toothless and shrinking,
Asleep and awake.

It was a dream, all of it,
but you are not here and you never were.
I made that choice. Long ago.
And then over and over and over by only standing still.
Yet you shear my bone from my jaw and ache there,
in the pockets where the roots used to hold.
In the places where my face takes shape
over bone and body.
In each tooth I spit out,
clean, ageless,
unreal, palmed.

I found a bottle of Excedrin
in the glovebox as I was looking for my registration.
I touch it, pull it out,
push it back in, tuck it
behind my owner’s manual and take-out menus –
such a small green and white bottle
from that night in Santa Cruz, when your back hurt
so so bad
after we made love
that you chewed the dry tablets
as we walked down Soquel at night,
the tiny white circles pulled out by your finger
and then laid on your right palm before you brought your hand,
only slightly cupped, up to your mouth
and then crushed all three between your teeth
before smirking at me.
I watched you eat those
and felt the chalky bitterness,
my cheeks pinched in near my bottom molars.
I carried the bottle in my purse,
you seemed almost surprised that I offered –
us not having seen each other in so many months –
and our conversations trying so hard to stay
away from what we were thinking –
far from our lips and our tongues
and the way you would moan, lightly and deeply,
whenever your arms used to wrap around me and my chin would push
into the place where your shoulder curves up into your neck.

We had made this mistake again
yet again
and so we spent the rest of the night
swallowing all of the words that might lead us back there –
to that skin on skin place
where we might fall over, tumble
into the past.
When I took that bottle from your hand and pushed it into my purse,
it seemed dangerously like kissing
so intimate
so close to holding hands as we walked to get a beer
and discuss
again
how this is best
this place of calm
of trying to move in reverse so that the hour or so before vanished
like together we could actually erase
the way it felt for me to push against you
and see your eyes over mine
watching my face
reading me, trying to decipher me.
It is better, because
my life is full of so many sugar landmines already,
sweet on the tip of my tongue and then bitter along the sides
and sliding down my tightened throat.

I see pieces of you in the earrings I wore that first night
in any pair of black stockings
in the one ruffled skirt I spread out
beneath me as we sat on the concrete that night
in all the other skirts that color
in the phone charger you borrowed in the motel,
so white and innocuous and off-putting,
the bra you unclasped with one hand.
In the reflection of my breasts in the mirror
I see your eyes as you took me in, saw me
right there before you, naked
so bare and pale

the toothpaste you used, mine
the brand of beer you drink
the backseat of my car where we lost our way
again, always again, always never again
the receipt from that bar in Santa Cruz
shoved into the glove-box
with the Excedrin when I realized
on my way home that night
that I still had them in my purse
and couldn’t bear to carry them in my house
bring you, pressed and jingling and numbing
into the place you’ve never been
but where I still see you

even if these pills only haunt my car
the stickiness of you is everywhere I am
in everything I’ve worn when I think of you
in every place I’ve touched and wished it were you
in everything I see through your eyes
the sweet bomb of your taste bursting in my brain
wherever your phantom self has perched
jawbreaker bombs
slow, chipped, sweet
filling my mouth
making me unable to speak
until I have sucked you down,
small enough
to move my tongue and my lips and my teeth
small enough to tuck you behind my cheek
small
enough

My dye stained fingers and thumb
look hot pink against the blue wave of this shot glass
the whiskey inside mid-shelf and hot,
in the way of cell-fire and skin-tingle,
nowhere near enough to remember
how it is I closed that motel door
as I watched your ambling legs –
making a show of walking in a loose ess-shape,
rail to wall to rail again –
moving slowly toward the hallway door
that carried you out into the early early a.m.
Jack London streets
like an old-timey fisherman
who ate his catch before the boat even docked,
fish scales clinging to the suede of your
way-too-young-for-you kicks,
stuck to the back of your hooded sweatshirt,
one small scale stuck to your scalp,
wedged under the wax you used
to push your hair back,
transferred from your jeans to my hand to your head,
my fingers reaching down and down into the near-sticky pinkie length hair
to touch where it is your bone is most tender, most fragile,
most sutured by nature and time.

This whiskey is not enough
to forget the feel of the cold air rushing into the room,
swirling around my bare legs
and up and under the short cotton shift I had on,
the one with geometric starburst patterns in blue and white,
the one you cinched into my waist, your hands curving up –
reaching for the smallest part of my torso,
starting from the widest part of my hips –
as you said: fuck it,
threatened to miss the doctor’s appointment
you almost forgot you had . . .

Not enough to forget
the way that I imagined you walking back to your car,
among the waking warehouses,
a vanishing version of yourself – like dust or ash or dreams,
washed in the rumble engine-churn and beepbeepbeep of forklifts
and the soft crashing of empty pallets on asphalt,
as I slid myself back under the covers
and drifted into half-sleep
until my alarm opened my eyes
all the way,
pupils shrunk suddenly from the sun washing through the curtain.

As I raise my hand up to my mouth
and tilt my head back and feel the glass against my lower lip –
this whiskey is your taste,
hot in my mouth, after you doused your burrito in Cholula
and then kissed me,
absent-mindedly in public, at one a.m.,
under the white aluminum awning
of the working-man’s bar we had just left,
the whiskey burn in my throat – then and now – a searing echo
of my on-fire tongue and the way that,
despite the diffuse yellow glow of streetlights through fog,
I could see your pupils – large and dark
and barely noticeable in your coffee-colored irises –
straining for enough light to see
me, you, the place where you had set your phone
on the sidewalk next to us while we sat at the curb,
while you pulled the foil back from the steamed tortilla –
eyes darting all around us, hands reaching for what you knew must be there,
every surface in shadows, every glance distracted,
hours to go before we sleep.

*This is a piece in a series written by the fictional character, Miriam. They are part of a larger in-process story and are the intellectual property of swankyday. Any links and/or excerpts should be cited as such and linked back to the original source. Thank you.

I’ve hoped, for more than a year now, to be able to find a way to merge my writing worlds – to add some of my fiction to the real-life, non-fiction writing that has made up this blog. The major obstacle – beyond whatever awkwardness or confusion that combining posts that are autobiographical with posts that are fictional has the potential to cause – has been that I generally hold my fiction very close to the chest until I have made enough revisions that I feel it is ready for the eyes of others. This has never happened until very late in the revising process. Very late. I’m almost done with this kind of late. Not until I am sure enough of what it is the story is doing that I can weather suggestions – know which to take in and ponder and which to deflect immediately.

It’s not that I don’t value feedback. I do. Greatly. It’s what I miss most about grad school – the careful, thoughtful, intelligent attention given to my work by people who value what I do, who also hold dear the heft and weight and importance of story. The intense sense of privacy I have about a story in progress is a protective urge, a coddling, a way to hold in my hands and keep safe what feels so very fragile.

The idea of having someone – anyone – read something while the story is still in the making is like asking you to move your furniture into a new home while the walls are still being raised and the pipes are being secured to the frame . . . risky and foolish and sure to slow and muddle the process. It’s like asking you to wear a dress I am making you – the seams only slipstitched and threatening to pull loose at the smallest movement, the hems ragged and uneven, the shape of it still undetermined. The art is in the final product – not in the process (although it is the process that I can’t give up). And unfinished is, well, unfinished. Messy and nowhere near the beauty you hope for when all is said and done.

So much of my writing process is about discovering a character, about finding the story, about creating the raw material that will lead me to the shape of things later – through revision, through reading the signs, through careful crafting of what I find in my hands at the end of the first draft. I don’t know where I’m going. I don’t know where the characters have been. I am, like a reader, discovering the story as I go.

I generally start with an image, a situation, a phrase, a vivid impression of a person, and then I write to figure it all out. If you asked me in the early stages of writing a story – what’s it about? – I most likely could not answer you. I could give vague descriptions or the barest of scenarios. But I just don’t know until very deep into the process. It’s like that point in any big argument or issue or discussion with someone you love – when things have exploded and you just can’t figure out why yet. You know what the problem is and you are digging through the details to find connections. It takes time, it takes writing, it takes studying the shape and sound of it all to know what’s being said, what’s being felt, what the story really is, at all.

I’ve struggled with how to open up my make-believe writing in a way that allows me to share it and still keep it safe, to merge these worlds of writing without cracking open what seems most sacred about fiction writing for me: the fragile, lovely act of getting lost in something and being surprised by where it goes. What comes out of curiosity, out of an obsession with something you just can’t shake (an image, a phrase, a face). The way that seeking leads to found.

There’s no writing like fiction writing. Not for me. Nothing feels quite like it. It’s the reason I can’t let go of it. Whether I ever publish any more of it or not. It feeds me in a way that no other writing can – at a very basic, visceral level. There is nothing like getting lost in a character to find myself at the end of a sentence or an image or a scene that is so right, so perfectly surprising. Saying wow even though you just wrote it yourself.

I’ve had a hard time over the last decade with staying engaged in this process. For a number of reasons. Right now, though, I am deep into it again. I have a character. I think of her several times throughout the day. I puzzle her. I am trying to figure her out, discover her past, see where she is heading. I have a scenario, a very specific set of two moments that brought her to me. The task is finding why she was in each of those snapshots in time, how they relate and what they will mean for whatever comes next. I have my hands deep in her past, in her future, in her present. I am lost in the loveliest kind of obsession about Miriam and her world.

One thing I do know, something I very recently discovered, is that she writes. Not as an identity or a vocation or even a calling. She does it to let loose what she can’t keep in. So in a twist to my process that is new for me, I am writing these pieces (mostly prose/poem kinds of things so far) in order to learn more about a character – periodically pausing my third-person story to meditate on these first person pockets of prose. These pieces may or may not make it into the final story, in part or in whole – who knows? They are valuable to me nonetheless. They tell me things about Miriam and her story that no other method will. I trust the process enough to believe this. And they have given me a way to weave this part of my fiction life into this blog. An unexpected gift out of an ever-changing process.

I will begin posting these pieces as they arrive. As I get to know Miriam – you will, too. They will be a window into the cryptic-ness of character development, of story unfolding, a keyhole glance into the way I make stories. She is not me. I am not her. We sit together, she and I, frequently these days. And I follow her. You can, too. I will trail behind her and write alongside of her – to find the story, to give it shape, to give her voice.